Automaton

Now this looks like fun: some roboticists at ETH Zurich plopped a GoPro onto a quadrotor and taught it to zip through a slalom course. We've got video of that, plus RoboBrrd on Indiegogo, a robot gymnast that's better than you. AND MORE, for this week's Video Friday.

Well, if you didn't already spend all of your pocket money on one of those NanoQ quadrotors, here's something that you'll want to blow the rest of it on: a robotic dragonfly that manages to be nearly as impressive as just about every other bio-inspired micro flying robot that we've ever seen, except somehow, this one is up for pre-order on Indiegogo for just a couple hundred bucks.

This is Nigel Ackland, and he's pouring himself a beer. With his robot hand.

Yesterday, we posted about some dirt cheap micro air vehicles on Kickstarter. Cheap hardware is great, but to make it do cool stuff, you usually need expensive (or at least, very clever) software. Researchers at Cornell have come up with a way to enable robotic aircraft to navigate around outdoor obstacles using just a single camera and hardware that mimics neuron architecture.

Back when I started writing about robots (get off my lawn, by the way), helicopters were big and complicated and dangerous and crashy. It's kind of amazing that now (or at least, soon, hopefully) you can get a tiny little quadrotor that can stabilize itself in flight for just under $100. Or, to put it another way, for just under $10,000, you could get a hundred of 'em.

We hope you and your robots made it through Hurricane Sandy unscathed, and if you're still without food or power, just remember that robots can be powered by humans but not vice versa. So watch your back. Here's our advice: keep your electronic friends distracted with this week's Video Friday.

We love jumping robots, and not just because they're so much fun to watch. Jumping is also a great way to get around: it's far more efficient than flying, and much more versatile than driving or walking or crawling. Jumping robots do still need a big burst of power to get off the ground, but after 20,000 jumps worth of analysis, researchers at Georgia Tech have found a secret that makes robotic hops ten times more efficient.

This is CIROS, a household service robot from the Korean Institute of Science and Technology, and it's going to take that giant knife right there and use it to whip up a big fat cucumber salad for you while definitely not stabbing any puny human meatbags.

For all that Willow Garage contributes to the robotics community, it's not often that they release new hardware. They've got the PR2, the TurtleBot, the PR3 and PR4 (oops, we can't tell you about them yet, bwahahaha), and that's about it. So when Willow comes up with something new, it's usually worth paying attention, and they've announced a new 3D printed adaptive gripper design for the PR2: the Velo 2G.

The official induction ceremony for the Robot Hall of Fame took place at at Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh last week. Over 17,000 people cast votes online to choose which are the four best robots of 2012, and which robots totally suck. We kid! If it was up to us, all of these robots would have made it in, and we're still holding out hope that a few of them will come back for the next round. But until that happens, here are the winners, along with some of our favorite video clips.